Loneliness, Isolation, and Presence

by on November 28, 2025

Loneliness is a human experience, but it’s one we don’t always acknowledge honestly. In this deeply personal conversation, Dan and Rachael open up about the moments when loneliness and suffering makes us unsure of what we need, what we want, or how to ask for help.

They also zoom out: why loneliness is rising, how our culture quietly reinforces isolation, and why recognizing our ache for connection is a sign of our humanity — not our failure.

You probably won’t find quick fixes or step-by-step solutions in this conversation. Rather, consider this episode an invitation to reflect on your own ambivalence, your desire for connection, and the quiet, messy courage it takes to reach out—both when you feel lonely and when you sense someone else might be, too.

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Episode Transcript: 

Dan: Alright, I want to describe a moment and get your input, but I’ll tell you the theme. When you’re alone and you are suffering, do you want connection or do you not? That’s the question, but here’s the story. Again, I had surgery, it didn’t go well in terms of the aftermath, weeks of bearing a catheter, unable to allow my prostate to release, and Becky’s gone because she has obligations. I am so sick and tired of watching distracting tv, and I really am in enough pain I can’t read, which is always my escape, but also a playground of meaning and engagement. I wanted to call someone, but then I didn’t, and it was all around oh, oh, vulnerability. And on the other hand, I just didn’t know what I wanted when I was going to call two or three of my best friends. Did I want their sympathy, empathy, their sense of suffering with me? Of course, but I also didn’t want it. Because sometimes when you’re not doing well, to be asked how you’re doing is almost more of a burden. So I felt so lonely, unable to do what I do, unable to be distracted, knowing at one level that Becky would be back in a number of hours. I wasn’t in a bad position, I just didn’t know what to do with myself. Help me, Rachael.

Rachael: Oh, I wish I could. I wish I was the person who could be like, oh, this is how you lean into this moment. But as you know, you are very much describing a familiar scenario to me that I’m still after years of therapy and so many new neural pathways in my brain and nervous system, like the ambivalence you’re describing of these moments where we know in our bones we’re not meant to be alone, and yet we don’t actually trust ourselves or other people to meet us in a way that would bring comfort. Because I think what we’re really wanting in these moments is comfort. And I mean, I’m just speaking for myself. I won’t speak for you. And to just, the ambivalence is so high and this is a place for myself where, and I think this is true for so many people, where we have such deep desire for connection and connection that doesn’t ask us to take care of others in those moments or to be okay so that other people can be okay. We want comfort, but we’re afraid of comfort. We’ve known so little comfort that to long for it just feels foolish. So yeah, I mean, you’re describing for me a scenario that I always think about in November because I had a very intense, but really in the grand scheme of things, minor surgery in 2015 on my foot. And at the time I did live alone and actually cherished a lot of my alone time. It was a very healing season. But I think that sense of when you are suffering in a way that you can’t turn to your regular ways of soothing, your regular ways of distraction, your regular ways of comfort, so to speak, and you need help and you can’t provide for yourself what you need in isolation, those places are particularly disruptive and dysregulating. And I think, yeah, bring up so much of the core of our ambivalence, and I know we could talk more about this, but I know for myself that season of my life was, it brought one of the greatest existential crises I think I’ve ever lived through. And I’ve lived through some pretty intense suffering or suffering with others. So it wasn’t necessarily like an extremity of suffering, it was the collision of I needed help from others. I couldn’t provide for myself what I needed to actually be okay for one of the first times in my life. And I also was like, people weren’t showing up in the ways. I thought, well, this will be obvious. I’ve had surgery, they’ll come. And I was like, I different than you, you’re saying I didn’t know what I wanted. And I was like, I will not call anyone and ask for help. I refuse. And so I was at a huge impasse because my normal mode of operation would be to fantasize about this is when I move and I’m just, oh, you know what? I’m moving back close to my family. At least they show up. I was in this moment of wanting to flee and sever cut off relationship. But I also knew I can’t really actually don’t want to do that, but I do want to do that. And I actually had to go back to very intensive therapy around attachment and my attachment struggles and I also had to confront very beautiful young parts of me that were like, I want comfort. I want to be comforted. And I get it. We’re scared. It’s hard, it feels like deprivation. And yet I had to actually contend with the fact that deprivation because of parts of my story was actually feeling more safe than taking the risk to experience a different kind of comfort. And so I do think loneliness has a way of bringing above ground things that maybe we can keep at bay when there’s more noise.

Dan: Any context of extremity where someone is facing a kind of onslaught, a tsunami of suffering, struggle, be it physical, be it relational, be it going through a divorce, going through your body, not being as you have known and wish people don’t know what to do with extremity. And that’s the intersection of either sending a nice card which is not meaningless or a kind of, I don’t know what to say, I don’t want to add to your burden. So it’s easy not to show up at the hospital. It’s easy not to show up in someone’s home knowing that your presence will never be enough. But on the other hand, the reality that the person suffering often is equally ambivalent. I don’t know what I want from you. I want care, but I know you can’t provide the kind of care that’s actually going to take away what I’m suffering. And so we’re all awkward. I think that’s one of the key words here. We’re awkward in the presence of extremity to a degree to which we end up, especially those who are suffering, being in the position of being very lonely and not knowing what to do, not with just what they’re suffering, but the additional sense of I really am alone. I really am disconnected and I’m on my own. And therefore bringing all the best and worst parts of our own sense of autonomy into a kind of, I will be in control and find some way to numb myself to escape what’s all going on. Before we even get any further, I want to talk a little bit more about loneliness, but we’re not known as being people and a podcast that generally offers a, here are four steps, but if you can capture what helped before we go any further, what helped?

Rachael: Well, again, I wish this was going to sound helpful. I think for me, I really was, I reached a place of desperation where it was kind of like, I mean I was watching, so part of my surgery recovery is I had to keep my foot elevated above my heart for two weeks. So I was like, I had made the foldout couch a bed in my living room and I just laid there with my foot elevated. And then anytime I had to get up to go to the bathroom or make food or I’m a neat freak, I wanted to vacuum my floor. It was like I’m hopping on one foot, vacuuming it as an Olympic sport, and then I’m in such pain because my foot’s swelling. I mean, it was just a thing. And I was watching Escaping Polygamy, a show on A&E about young women who are literally trying to escape polygamous cults. And I was like, okay, this is making me feel better because it could be worse. When I was looking for the how much worse could it get, how much more? In some ways I was really testing myself, are you going to serve? Will you survive here? Are you going to find your resilience? Are you going to be a weakling and throw in the towel? Right? So I mean, it was a war. And I think in some ways my desperation of just like, I’m scared because I actually don’t know how to get out of this one without asking for help. And I mean, I wish I could say, and I did kind of reach out to a few friends and be like, I need you to get it together. I got angry. So I think it’s my anger motivated me to do something. And I knew I’m messy. I feel young, I’m angry. I’m also not sure I want your comfort, but I’m also scared of myself and I’m scared of what I’m feeling. I’m scared of the despair that I feel close to. I’m scared of the exhaustion and I’m scared of the fact that I’m doing things that I know are harmful to this recovery process because I feel like I don’t have any other choice because there’s no one else there to help me do the thing. So yeah, I mean, I think what actually helped me was coming to terms with the fact that I was a mess and I was not going to be able to get myself out of this mess without some help. And I think in some ways, having to let people get near me in the midst of my mess. And like you said, what I wanted was for someone to just come stay with me and be there, but having to accept the hour someone could give and accept the DoorDash things that were showing up at my house. And again, I think it’s my internal world was like, there is no one here. And in reality, people were showing up in the ways that they could. It just like you said, it wasn’t near enough for what I most needed. And so yeah, I am talking, I think it was within a couple maybe a month of this surgery, I went back to therapy. I need help understanding why this moment, again, I understand logically why I’m lonely. I don’t understand why I felt so, like I refuse to ask for help and I don’t actually believe anyone will come. So I needed to get more into where’s this trauma coming from?

Dan: Well, and to me, what you’ve described and you were suffering far more than what I would say was true of my current situation, but the first word for me that connects is honoring the ambivalence without trying to resolve it. And I think that was the beginning for me of just being able to, as I’m sitting on the couch, just in one sense, fragmenting, honoring I’m not doing well. And I think between honoring and honesty, that sense of I am aware of things that I’m not capable right now to resolve. I can’t get a book, I can’t watch more TV. Literally sitting was agonizing, but standing up equally. So owning my body’s fragmentation, let alone my own heart, but I love what at least I’m hearing, and maybe I’m imputing my own experience, but the word defiance, a kind of defiance that allowed you to finally just go, dammit, I’m calling. I will not just remain within my own internal landscape, I’m going to reach out, but I reach out as a mess. I reach out angry, but I also reach out calling good friends to step in better than what they had chosen to do. I think that is one of those points that when we talk for example about addiction, admitting that you’ve come to the end of yourself, that first step and the 12 step approach I think is just not for only addiction, I think is at one level for almost all moments of that internal war. And that’s what I did. I finally called my best friend, I called Tremper, and what was fascinating, when I began to tell him my situation, he was furious with me.

Rachael: Oh yeah.

Dan: He was like, I didn’t even know that you were having surgery.

Rachael: Oh, I thought he was furious at how hard it was. No, he’s mad at you because he didn’t even know.

Dan: And at that moment going, I didn’t even think it was that big of a deal. It was only after I looked when I began having complications, I didn’t realize it was considered to be major surgery. So he’s like, and again, I’m not going to try and replay the entire conversation, but his first response was, for somebody as bright as you are, sometimes you are just an idiot. And we laughed. I don’t think there was any good care that would’ve been better than his anger surprise and his playful, but also honoring, statement of sometimes you’re just an idiot. And in being able to hold that together, then a great deal of his heart of suffering on my behalf became a gift. And thankfully he was also aware that in his kindness, there was something in me that was uncomfortable. So as much as we have spent a lot of time on this category of kindness, there’s such ambivalence, even for those of us who know, it is literally one of the most life-changing gifts we can encounter. It is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. And Trumpers kindness was inviting me to a level of will you receive what will not resolve but will tend to something of what your heart needs? So I think we have a similar experience of honoring honesty and defiance that actually brought about, at least in my case pretty quickly, some significant change. But for you, it entered into a lot longer, harder, but in some sense deeply restorative a process.

Rachael: Yeah, I would say it was a defining turning point in my recovery. I mean, in some ways, up to that point, even the way I was approaching the surgery recovery, in some ways it was very militant. I will do all these things and I will do them whatever I need to do. This is the season I became a plant person because I was like, well, I’m stuck in my apartment. I might as well get a plant. And then the first three plants I got died because I was not paying attention to the nuances of the healing that they… or how to tend to them, the nourishment they would need, the different types of water, the different types of soil, the different levels of light. And within a year, I went from having three plants that died to 72 plants in my apartment, most of which were on the dining room table. So again, that’s very, to me that was such a metaphor. It was also initiated some deeper healing around an assault I had experienced a couple of years prior. It also invited me into some deeper work around attachment that I actually think opened my heart to be available, to love a partner in a way that, not that I wasn’t, I don’t agree with, I don’t believe in the like, oh, you have to do all this work to be ready…. ’cause too many people find their person when they are nowhere near ready for that kind of love. I don’t think it’s like a cause and effect thing. I just think for me, it led to a season of just such profound transformation and freedom that again, it’s not like today, 10 years later I’m like, and now I’ve arrived at some… Now I’m actually circling back to, I mean, I think I’ve talked about this enough on the podcast, having a baby living in somewhat of an isolated area away from most of my core friends and family in that postpartum season, like profound levels of loneliness that brought up so many of the same ambivalence. I mean, Michael mean so many times he’s been like, I can help with this thing. I can be like, I need help. And he’ll be like, I can help with this thing. And then I’m like, no, you can’t. I’m fine. I’ve got it. And just how crazy making that must be when you see someone struggling and you know can offer help. But it may not be the same way the other person would do it, but it could help hold something. But I have to relinquish control. So I am very much back in familiar waters, and I know I’m not alone in that. We were talking about the surgeon general last year said this loneliness is an epidemic.

Dan: One out of three Americans feel significantly lonely every week. That’s pretty staggering. Then what really was heartbreaking was that we know that at least in terms of what the data indicates, that loneliness is related to 26% higher premature death related to heart disease, to diabetes, to the experience of your body being out of sorts. So even the data that it’s comparable, loneliness is comparable in terms of a physiological threat equal to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So you begin to go, wait a minute. The phenomena that many of us, a third, would say loneliness is a significant issue. I would honestly say it’s not for me. I don’t think I’m in that one-third, but what I’d also say is it is human to be lonely If you don’t have moments where you have this ache for something more, something better, something that indeed you’re sitting with good friends and they fail to ask you any questions whatsoever about your day, your week, your month, whatever. Yeah, that happens pretty regularly. But when it does, do I have the integrity to admit this feels lonely and to be, then as you describe, good friends failing to engage and you begin to assess not with judgment like you’re all bad. But the reality then of, at least for me, how often do I tend to understand the loneliness that even my good friends feel and making it even more complex even when things are really good, I can just remember times laughing with dear friends and having the sense of I don’t want the evening to end. And then when it ends holding both the delight and joy, but also the sense of I won’t see them again for a long time, and that nostalgia, which is that deep desire to be home. I think there is something about goodness that actually creates a different kind of loneliness when you have those moments that are really phenomenal and special. We’re talking primarily about when things are not well, but when things are uniquely well, I have come to have more moments being able to honor, oh, it increases my ambivalence. I am in my body, but I wish to be home. I love what I had this evening and I won’t for a long season. That sense of the true nostalgia is for what only heaven can provide. Holding all that I think for the majority of people, sounds like what’s wrong with the two of you.

Rachael: But I also think even when you just look at some of the data, I mean I’ve read so many, I think very profound and helpful articles around the loss of social spaces of connection, the loss of really these kind of skills to connect outside of our how much more time people are spending in their homes or you’re in public, you’re at the gym, you’re doing things where you’re around people, but you’re not actually having meaningful connection or engagement with people. I think they’ll look back on this period of history and the rise of social media and kind of the ways it creates a false sense of connection that I think is actually making us even more isolated and alone, but feeling like we shouldn’t be because we’re connecting with people. So again, when we start to understand in some ways loneliness is not just like, oh, I as a person am having this experience. I struggle to connect. It’s like, no, we’re actually in a society and a culture that’s cultivating a sense of isolation and we’re still recovering. COVID is still a reality and there are people with autoimmune disorders that still have to isolate and avoid large crowds. And we spent, not everyone, because I know some states and some cities had very lax rules during COVID, and I know this is a very polarizing topic, but some of us lived in cities that took it very seriously and we had a long season of isolating and trying to protect people. And so I do think that for as much as we might sound like total weirdos…

Dan: I think so.

Rachael: I do actually think people can relate to what it is to have experiences of longing to be known and seen and joined in different ways. And I think absolutely you’re right, the kind of ends of the spectrum of very intense suffering, unless you have tasted very intense suffering, it’s rare that you have the capacity to get close to someone who’s suffering and to kind of feel the powerlessness to feel that you can’t remove from them what they’re facing, but you can be with them in a way that lightens the burden, that creates a canopy of care that feels at least like it is accomplishing something. Or that end of the spectrum where you taste something so good that you’re meant for in your bones, but it doesn’t get to linger longer than it is. And can we bear that kind of goodness when it will intensify our desire in the absence of it? And we see this a lot in our training programs or in our healing work where you create something together in midst of suffering that’s just really Holy. And some groups do continue to connect and that can actually, I’ve seen beautiful friendships come from people who met and being in a small group together to do healing work or training work. And yet that sense of we won’t… because it won’t be the group with the same dynamics and the same parameters and the same intentionality, something of that goodness, you have to let it be what it was and then receive the goodness that comes, even if it doesn’t quite fulfill what you had tasted that other time. That takes, as we’ve talked about before, that takes being faithful in the small. I’m just saying for myself to be able to savor goodness when I’m in the midst of it, knowing I’ll have to let it go at some point or let it be a memory that I savor takes a certain kind of courage and muscle memory almost… Like, okay, I can survive the disparity, right? I can survive. I experienced this the last time I was in Seattle. I got to see you. I got to see a few other really dear friends, and it was just very rich time that didn’t require a lot of effort. And when you’ve moved to a new place, those kinds of friendships take time. They take efforts, they take longevity. And I had already developed that with so many people over long seasons and the kind of nourishment that came and kind of imagine, oh, what if this could have been my life? And then having to depart but still take in the goodness I was taking in knowing that I would be going back to a place where I’m working on developing new friendships that hold that level of depth and ease.

Dan: And that’s what I mean by the concept of defiance. It’s not going to be enough take in what’s there, don’t resent it’s not enough. On the other hand, do not hate your own heart for the wanting of more that will likely not be fully available. But to me, a lot of this is trusting the power of the face, trusting that just having somebody’s face engage you with heartache concern or in Tremper’s case, the playfulness of you’re an idiot, we’re meant for the face. We know that infants as young as literally one and two days old will orient to a face in a way that they orient to nothing else. So we are literally from birth hardwired to look at a face and read something in that face that begins to change something of literally our physicality, our internal, shall we say, torment and confusion. And I think that when I go back and think about my time when I ended up having after surgery to go back to a hospital in the midst of great agony to get another catheter, and Jack my male nurse who was beautifully tatted, his one tat ran all the way up his arm, all the way up to his neck, up through his face and covered his entire bald head. And look, I’m an old man. Even that level of tatting is like, it’s pretty pronounced. And he came in and he goes, you’re in agony. Let’s see what we can do. And there was such a, a playful ferocity, trust me, I’m going to fight for you. And on the other hand, a generosity that was, and I remember thinking, I believe you, I mean the instant he spoke, I had this internal change. Did it take away my agony? Not a bit. It still took almost 15 minutes before the catheter was finished, but it was enough just at that moment to take me from what felt like just inner despair to a sense of I can join somebody else in their kindness. And I think that raise of, I can join you in kindness at the moment, I can’t be kind to you. I can’t be kind to myself. All I can do is somehow do whatever I can do to feel like I can survive. But in that moment, his kindness, and I’ve used this phrase before, the idea that sometimes I have no faith, but I can borrow the faith of others until in some sense the deficit begins to change within me. And I think that framing of, do we believe in the power of the face of others? But then the same question of do we believe in the power of our own face on behalf of others? That sense of, I don’t know what to say, I’m afraid I’m going to make it worse if I step in and to go stop it. Your lack of knowledge, awkwardness in some sense bring your face, bring it in its fullness, and in that you are bringing something, so God-like. Something that really is prosopon–a Greek word face, is the word presence. And so when we speak about presence, yeah, your presence is as the very face of God in those moments. And yeah, given the fact that I’m suffering, the face of God may bring me to a point of wanting to smack you, but on the other hand, I know there is something in me that is called now to the humanity that my own suffering seems to occlude and keep me from being close to.

Rachael: Yeah, I think you’re… I’m just thinking of moments even recently with a dear friend who is suffering, whose child is suffering and just getting news, getting news one day that felt relieving, getting news the next day that felt like this is going to be a longer journey. And that feeling of, I didn’t have words that would feel in any way sufficient, but I knew I could hop on a little Marco Polo and at least show her my face that is taking in and naming, this is really hard and you’re not alone. And I’ll keep bringing my face to you even if I too don’t know how this will end or I don’t know how to change these circumstances. And it makes me think of also my child Evie. When you were saying babies the two days, my people are like, how long has she been very intensely, passionately calling you to face her and see her and look at her? And I’m like, since she came out of the womb, that baby, they put her in a little swaddle and tried to, she was on me and they put her in the little bassinet next to my bed and she would just lay there swaddled up on her side, just eyes wide open, just staring at me basically, are you going to bring me back over there or not? And even now when she’s playing pretend, because we’re in this phase where I have to call her back to me like look at my face. So I’ll say, look at my eyes, look at my face. And so she’ll be like playing, pretend that there’s stuffed animals that she’ll say, look at my eyes, look at my face. And I don’t know, there’s something really playful and I think in many ways it is a core part of the heart of God and we’re moving into a… and I don’t get mad because I’m going to say a word that I know you tend to get, it’s overused, but I’m going to talk about the incarnation ’cause we’re moving into advent and this Sunday actually is going to kick off the advent season, I believe, and there is something so hopeful about a God who wanted to get closer to our face and to show us his face like God’s face in the flesh through Jesus. And I don’t know. I think you’re absolutely right, and I think kindness in the midst of our loneliness, in the midst of our agony, in the midst of our goodness is so disruptive in the most powerful and beautiful ways because we can so barely tolerate a face of kindness towards us. I think part of our loneliness that we haven’t talked about is it comes from the debris of trauma, comes from the ways we feel so ashamed, the ways our ambivalence that can we bear goodness if it comes, is it safer to stay with deprivation because at least maybe we kind of know how to survive that. Kindness is so disruptive and yet so compelling when we encounter kindness in the face of another. It’s so beautiful and compelling and so terrifying and disruptive.

Dan: And requires just what we’re putting words to the ability to hold. I want it. I want it desperately, and I don’t. And yet I do. And yet I do. And in that defiance of being able to admit my creational reality, I was made for this. I was made for God’s delight. I was made for his honor. And I’m so used to not seeing something of that. Even when I look in the mirror, or maybe particularly when I look in the mirror and in that sense of we refuse to receive what we doubt that we have the capacity to give, but when we begin to say, yeah, my aging ragged looking face is meant to be and is something of the face of God, then I think there’s something that we then begin to own with regard to the face of the other. And again, I’m not going to take afield to step into one of the philosophers that I think have most affected me, and that’s Levinas and the power of the face that the face obligates us to be face to face with another human being. There’s something in me as I encounter your face that draws the word response-ability. And I know that most people don’t hear that the way I want it to be heard, responsibility. No, no, no. You have the response to the face when the face is harsh, there’s a response. When the face is gentle and tender, there’s a response. But always you have the right to bring your face with honesty, with truth, but ultimately with the presence of God to another human face. And that’s so much more powerful than what words do you have? If we can begin to believe even a bit of that, there is a sense in which then the current polarization, the fact that many people in the midst of this crazy era have felt like they need to leave communities they’ve been part of or sometimes families they’ve been part of. And then we’re talking about a different sense of loneliness and isolation because to stay within a community that you feel is fundamentally threatening you at stonewalling, attacking, not honoring the core dignity that you bear. Now there’s a loneliness that comes because you have been sent in exile and in that sense of being exiled, I need a God who knows exile. I need a God who not only chose, but chose in the departure from that, which was again, we cannot even begin to imagine perfect, glorious, beautiful to become flesh to bear the cost of flesh. That’s where I need your face, Rachael. I remember the first time I showed you my, shall we say, my bag of urine that I have to cart around the sense of agony on your face, but also humor. It was the playfulness, kindness of holding together. We can laugh because of the resurrection, but we can grieve because of the incarnation and holding all that I do think is where we begin to dispel something of the dark power of loneliness. So as we enter this advent season, let’s just see what comes.

Rachael: Sounds like a plan.